Sun uncorks Jini, names partners

Sun Microsystems took its Jini technology out of beta testing
today, releasing the final version of the connect-anything-to-everything
technology and announcing 37 industry partners that have signed on to the
initiative.

Sun announced several companies cooperating in the Jini effort, including
big-name makers of computers, chips, cellular phones, consumer electronics,
disk drives, and other equipment. And if Jini catches on, it could be a
profitable enterprise for Sun. Although developing Jini products is free,
selling those products will cost either 10 cents per Jini-enabled unit or
$250,000 a year per product line, according to some reports.

For months, Sun Microsystems has been
touting
the Java-based "spontaneous networking" technology, offering glimpses of home and business uses of
Jini at trade show demonstrations. Jini lets equipment and software modules
easily plug in to networks, governing how they attach to the network, announce
themselves, and share information.

"This could be the next step for Java," said Jim Waldo, Jini's chief architect
since the project got under way in April 1997. Jini will unglue the processor
from the hard disk drive, Waldo said, letting programs instead pull code and
data over the network without making people worry about whether every device
can speak the language of all the other devices. "Instead of requiring a
processor and a disk, what is required is a processor and a network," Waldo
said.

Some proposed uses for Jini might sound straightforward: plugging
laptops, standalone disk drives, or printers into the office network, or
connecting a new DVD player to the TV, stereo system, and computer with a
single connection.

But Waldo offered some more radical examples, too. A user's PalmPilot could
display menus and goods for sale as a person walked down a street by
restaurants and stores. A car could plug into a citywide Jini network to find
out where parking or restaurants are. Or a repairman could remotely
troubleshoot a Jini-enabled washing machine.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft isn't
on the list of supporters. The Sun rival is hard at work on its own new-age
networking technology, called Universal Plug and Play. Microsoft and several other companies are developing
ways to shield users from the often-obtuse demands of networking equipment
together.

One key partner in the Jini initiative is Ericsson, a Swedish portable phone
and networking company that began the Bluetooth radio networking effort. The
integration of Bluetooth and Jini technology will let nearby devices set up
their own networks, exchanging information automatically.

Network software maker Novell, long a
champion of Java, also announced it would license Jini. With its expertise in
providing network-based server software, Jini would seem like a "no-brainer"
for the resurgent firm. "It's Sun and Novell seeing their technology lining up
pretty well," said Steve Holbrook, a product strategist for Novell.

In particular, Novell may find Jini useful as a way to promote its directory
services software, called NDS. Using Jini, along with some management
software,
the company could theoretically make it quite easy to add Jini code to any
device on a network, since those devices populate NDS. The company's directory
essentially serves as a central database for anything that is
network-connected.

Among other companies who are backing Jini:

America Online said Jini is "instrumental in supporting our AOL anywhere
strategy," which will let users take advantage of email and other AOL services
from more devices than just personal computers.

IBM said Jini could help create a world of "pervasive computing," where "a
million businesses and a billion people are connected by a trillion
devices," a
world IBM wants to help build. Such a world requires that "the marketplace
evolves in an open manner," IBM said.

Samsung plans to use Jini in home
network technology, called Home Wide Web.

Philips said Jini ties nicely into the home audio-visual networking
technology called HAVi that Philips and Sony use.

Metrowerks said it will support
Jini in its CodeWarrior software development tools.

Xerox said it believes Jini could help people become more efficient by
being able to use document services regardless of the person's location.

Canon said Jini could help customers with installing and using its imaging
products "over any network."

And BizTone, the company that
captured Java evangelist Miko Matsumura, said Jini will let the company
deliver
enterprise resource planning (ERP) services such as accounting over the
Internet companies paying for transactions instead of for hardware. BizTone
Financials 1.0, the company's first product, is due in February.

Bringing Jini up to speed
The release today makes Jini compatible with Java 2, the latest version of the
Java technology that Sun released in December. Until today, Jini developers
have had to deal with the fact Jini has required them to use an older beta
version of the Java technology.

But there's still more work to do.

Waldo said Jini 1.0 has some security in place, but that a full system
won't be
arriving until the next version of Jini six to nine months from now. He added
that Jini includes the inbred security attributes of Java. "It's hard to do
malicious things in Java," Waldo said.

Jini devices announce themselves when they plug into the network, logging
on to
a registration service and describing what Java standards they support--for
example, printing.

This requires that an application
programming interface (API) for that device to have been written. Sun
currently controls the API process, either by leading the effort to write the
standards or, in a new system, by choosing an expert to lead the effort.
Sun
executives have said the new system will be more common for writing APIs in
the
consumer electronics space, where there will be the greatest need for new Java
APIs.

Jini is the first case where Sun is trying out its new Community Source
License, a middle way between the free-for-all techniques of open-source
software development and the more tightly controlled world of traditional
proprietary technology.

Under the Community Source License, anyone can license Jini and develop
products for free. But companies wanting to ship Jini products for a profit
must pay Sun a fee.

The community-source license responds to complaints by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and other industry
heavyweights that Sun's grip on the Java specification is too tight.

Because Jini is based on cross-platform Java technology, Sun says Jini-enabled
devices won't have to worry about complexities that emerge when chips,
operating systems, and network technologies get mixed in an environment. All
Jini devices need is a
Java
Virtual Machine, the environment where Java programs run.

In fact, a Jini device doesn't need to have its own JVM. It can piggyback on
another virtual machine elsewhere in a network. That allows much smaller
devices to be Jini-enabled, Waldo said, since taking advantage of this proxy
service requires about a hundredth or thousandth as much software.

To run Jini, a device needs about 640K of memory to hold Java, Waldo said.
With
more engineering, that memory footprint could be shrunk, he added.

In December, Sun loosened Java licensing rules so that other companies could
develop "clean-room" clones of JVMs, requiring that the clones must pass
compatibility tests before they earned the Java coffee cup logo.

Hewlett-Packard and others have developed their own virtual machines. In
addition, Mozilla.org, the group that
oversees the development of the Netscape
Communications Web browser, released a free Java virtual machine yesterday
called ElectricalFire that
has no Sun code.

"ElectricalFire began as an in-house commercial compiler project at
Netscape in
early 1997. The compiler, which was never publicly announced, was scheduled
for
release in June 1998. It was canceled in January 1998, when the company made a
strategic shift away from Java," the Web site says.